Presently, many businesses engaged in international transactions experience a variety of billing and payment failures. These failures are, in part, a result of using an ad hoc, decentralized method for billing and payment (e.g., telephone conversations, faxes, conventional mail, emails, etc.). These methods can result in invoices not being received or being significantly delayed. Payments may be delayed due to the cumbersome process of manually generating invoices and/or failed delivery or misplacement of invoices.
Additional problems that may arise from current billing and payment methods could be disputes and misunderstandings due to a lack of billing documentation. Current methods also create extra work because of the manual billing process which is not integrated with online payment and accounting systems or integrated with cash payment systems. Furthermore, manual reconstruction of billing and payment history is often required in order to create an audit trail. Accordingly, these and other problems and shortcomings with current methods and systems are overcome by the present invention.